The Third Bullet (23 page)

“He’s coming around,” yelled Swagger, seeing that the two on the bench were covering for a brave guy, cutting right and hoping to ease among the Stalins from that flanking point of entry. Swagger rose, guessing the gun smoke, floating debris, and floating slivers of grass and brush would give him a little concealment, and set to intercept. He dropped back a row of Joes, cut right, ran low, paused as he waited for the shadow of the gunman, then stepped out on the diagonal and fired twice into the approaching killer’s heavy chest, then fired a finisher into center forehead. It was not pretty, but it was final. The gunner went down hard, headfirst, feet flying up with such force that a Gucci loafer popped off one. Swagger scurried, leaned forward, and retrieved the Krink, deftly unlinking the sling catch.

Swagger rose and, as steadily as possible, emptied the mag, about fifteen remaining rounds, into the bench where the last two bad boys hid, this time rendering it further useless under splinters and dust. One of them rose to run, and Stronski leaned into a sight picture to take him. He fired once and his pistol jammed, its slide stuck halfway back.

Swagger swung to take the runner down with the Krink, not remembering it was empty, and pulled on nothing. He dropped it, shifted the pistol to his right hand, and suddenly felt a horse kick in his hip as a pelting spray of frags and superheated dust flew upon him.

He rolled left into the fetal, locked his elbows between his knees, and found the man who stood over the defenseless Stronski and pressed just as that guy got another mag into his Krink and was about to massacre the sniper. Swagger hit him in the eye, blowing it out, and the man twisted like a dancer and corkscrewed earthward.

Swagger turned back on peripheral motion and settled in for a shot on the surviving gangster now fleeing, saw civilians across the street behind him, possible friendly-fire casualties, and opted not to shoot. The big guy, all athlete and amazingly fast, made it out an exit and dove into the open door of a sleek black limo, which burned rubber on the acceleration.

“Dump guns, get out of here,” commanded Stronski.

“You’ve been hit.”

It was true. The left side of Stronski’s white silk shirt bloomed the dark spread of blotted blood.

“It’s nothing, you go, get out of here. Do it now! I am fine. I cannot run much.”

Swagger dropped the pistol, pulled his watch cap low, and started to walk forcefully away, crossing a street, finding an alley, cutting down it, finding a broad boulevard. Police cars roared along it, looking for a turn to the park, which, as it developed, was not accessible from that thoroughfare. Two passed within feet of Swagger, but in them, youngish men seemed alarmed and unaggressive, unwilling to get any closer until they were sure the shooting had stopped.

Finding a small restaurant, Swagger tried to look cool. He said, “
Koka,
” and waited as the drink was brought, hoping no one noticed that he was hit too.

R
eilly e-mailed her boss at Foreign. “Seems to be a big shoot-out downtown here. They say five dead in an assassination attempt. Some mafia deal. Interested?”

She heard back in a bit.

“Sounds routine. Happens here all the time. Pass, thanks. Stay on that Siberian gas thing for the time being. Maybe if Putin comments on shoot-out, set up a Sunday thumbsucker on Russian mafia—getting more violent? Think about it.”

So she went back to tap-tap-tapping. “. . . while concerns about the danger of cold drilling for natural gas under the Siberian tundra continue to rise after last month’s blast, Petro-Diamond spokesmen argue that the explosion was a fluke. Moreover, they say the billion-dollar energy firm will stick with recently announced plans to expand drilling operations beyond the Nebeyaskaya range in the Arctic Circle.”

Her cell rang. She saw the number was local but didn’t recognize it. “Hello?”

“Hey,” she heard Swagger say.

Normally able to handle cops as well as grieving widows, angry generals, and romantic drunks, she was momentarily nonplussed by the voice, arriving as it did from a man who’d vanished ten days before.

“Where are you calling from? Why are you here? I thought you’d left.”

“I’m in the parking lot. I’m under your car, actually. Flat on my back.”

“What?”

“I seem to be bleeding. I made it here on the Underground. I had to get flat or even this small wound could empty me.”

“Jesus Christ, Swagger. You! You were in that gunfight. I should have known.”

“I think I’m the missing bodyguard.”

“And that was Stronski?”

“Stronski and Swagger, the two of us, both old guys, against the world. How is he?”

“They say the purported target is all right. Wounded, but expected to recover.”

“Very good news.”

“Okay, stay there. I’ll come down and get you. I need to get you to a medical—”

“No, no. It just tore through some muscles and skidded off the steel ball I have for a hip. That’s all. Bandages will do fine. In a few days, maybe you can dump me at the embassy, and I’ll be all right. Some corpsman will sew me up. The FBI will verify me, and they can ship me back more or less in one piece. I don’t want any police interviews, believe me.”

“Swagger, you have
such
a talent for getting yourself into bad shit.”

She got down to the dark lot to find him wriggling out from underneath one of the small Chevys that the
Post
provides its reporters in Moscow. Once he got himself upright, he was able to move without much more of a limp than he normally had, though looking closely, she saw the small bullet hole and a dark stain that suggested some blood loss.

“No arteries, no veins. Like a whack from a baseball bat. My whole side’ll be purple for a month, but once the laceration heals, it’ll be fine.”

“You’ve been shot!” she said. “It can’t be fine!”

“I’ve been shot before. Please, it’s not a big thing. My main worry is Stronski now.”

“He’ll be all right.”

The small elevator took them up seven flights. They turned through a metal door that could have guarded a bank vault and walked into a spacious double living room apartment laden with sofas, icons, books, textile hangings, art, all of it in splendid taste. Swagger had nothing to compare it to; he had never seen such a den of the mind as opposed to the body, but he imagined it as the kind of place some sort of fancy professor might keep.

“Nice,” he said. “Lots of books. Bet you’ve read ’em all.”

“Not hardly. The office is through the door down the way; it’s another apartment, rigged for business with our computers, which are tied in to the
Post
’s in Washington. It’s like I’m twenty-five feet away from my boss, not four thousand miles.”

He flopped on the sofa, not that interested in miracles of modern journalism. “This is fine for me. Maybe in a few minutes I’ll head into the bathroom and take a shower. The bleeding seems to have stopped. I can feel it stiffening.”

“Do you want anything to eat or drink?”

“You know, I am hungry.”

She fixed him a sandwich and a
koka,
which he greedily consumed. Then he told her all about the event.

“God,” she said, her face alarmed, “how can you be so calm? All those men trying to kill you, and it’s some kind of a joke.”

“Sooner or later, somebody will manage it. Or I’ll fall off the porch and starve to death like an old stag with a broken leg. It’ll happen. I’ve seen it enough. It’s a fact. I just want to get this one done, though. That would be enough.”

“How did they find you?”

“They didn’t follow either of us. Maybe they had a GPS planted on Stronski, but I doubt it. I picked the spot, he didn’t, and he didn’t know about it early enough to notify anyone, and neither could anyone else in his outfit. So my guess is they had a bunch of likely Stronski places under static observation, with a kill team near each one, and when we showed up, they got into action in a few minutes. What that
tells me again is what someone else said: someone is spending a lot of money on this. Only governments have money like that to spend, or oligarchs, or Hollywood directors.”

“I doubt Steven Spielberg has it in for you.”

“You never can tell.”

“You’d better get some sleep. Do you want to move into the bedroom?”

“I’ll take the shower, sack out. I should be okay to move tomorrow. You won’t tell anybody I’m here?”

“If I told my editors I had a guy on the couch shot up in a Russian mafia gunfight who was investigating the Kennedy assassination, they’d ship me to the Anne Arundel county mall in two minutes.”

“I don’t know what that is, but if you say it’s a bad thing, I’ll take your word for it.”

He lay on the sofa. Escape. I made it. Tomorrow I’m safe, the Moscow thing is over, and nobody’s hunting me. He tried to relax, and in a bit, fed and showered and only marginally uncomfortable from the hit on his steel hip, he fell into a restless sleep.

But escape was the theme of the evening, and as he tried to draw some pleasure from his own, his mind naturally went to his buddy Ozzie Rabbit. That guy had been on the run too, although he never made it. Swagger, reliving the sense of crushing dread that had accompanied him on the walk out of the Park of the Fallen Heroes, came awake in the Moscow apartment. He knew sleep would not visit again. But Ozzie Rabbit would.

He rose, went to the window, and looked down across the open park between the buildings in the complex, while on the horizon, those various new Dallases that were the future of Moscow rose and sparkled against the dark of the night. He could barely make out his own image in a trace of reflection on the window; he saw a specter, a shape, haunted by the nearness of death.

In time Lee Harvey moved in and sat next to him, face dull (as it always was, except when he got shot), hair a mess, skin pasty, broadcasting distress and melancholy and yet defiance and pure psycho anger. Man on the run, 11/22/63.

He makes it out of the Book Depository, though he is briefly stopped by a policeman, and heads up Elm Street. He has skipped out seconds before the police arrive in force to cordon off the building and search it. He continues on Elm Street, passing the Dal-Tex Building, disappearing into the crowd, and four blocks later jumps aboard a bus heading back down Elm Street. He is so determined to get aboard this vehicle that he stops it in the street and hammers on the closed door for admittance.

That was a mystery in the classical assassination canon, Swagger knew. Many wonder why he chose to go back in the direction he came from, back toward Dealey Plaza, the site of the assassination, where crowds and policemen were collecting in large numbers and traffic, as a consequence, was backing up.

Some say he had no plan at all, he was a moron in a panic, he took the first chance he saw to get out of the area.

On the other hand, it
is
the no. 2 bus, and its destination is not arbitrary. It will take him past the Depository, under the triple overpass, over the Trinity River, and into Oak Cliff, the area of Dallas where his roominghouse is located.

Swagger realized: Peculiar. It’s clear he has no escape plan in place. This means either, first, he’s an idiot, acting irrationally, beyond comprehension; or second, his original escape plan is ruined for some reason, and the only thing he can think to do is return home. He counted on something happening, and it has not; now he must deal with that reality.

The bus soon runs into traffic as it approaches the chaos of Dealey. Oswald hops off, cuts a few blocks across town to a Greyhound station, and catches the only cab ride of his life.

Swagger had a new thought: This known fact has been undercommented
on. Oswald is at the Greyhound station, he has dough in his wallet, and hey, it’s a
bus station,
right? So there are buses leaving regularly for other cities in Texas. Yet he does not buy a ticket and climb aboard. It’s true, he may know that it’s a matter of time before law officers arrive, check on last-minute ticket purchases, and send messages to the highway patrol to waylay buses. But if escape were his goal, given the way his world was about to be closed down, wouldn’t that be his best chance, to scurry away before the manhunt net was thrown out?

No answer presented itself. Swagger continued narrating to the two figures in the dim window that overlooked the Russian nightscape.

It is known that Oswald takes the cab to his roominghouse in Oak Cliff. He’s smart enough to have it drop him a few blocks away, so he can recon for law enforcement activity before blundering in. That suggests that the roominghouse is a rational destination, something he’s thought about and decided makes the most sense given the problems he faces. He knows that it won’t be long before a canvass of employees is taken at the Texas Book Depository and his name comes up and he’s ID’d as missing. He knows that eventually—but not how quickly—the police will connect him to the recovered rifle. The cops could arrive at any second. Yet he takes the chance to go to his roominghouse, to beat the police response, in order to get one thing: his pistol.

Who did he think he was, Baby Face Nelson?